This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Istanbul
There is no better way to start the morning than watching Istanbul slide past as your boat climbs the Bosphorus towards the Black Sea — and mansions, cafés, castles and old fishing villages tumble into one another.
There is no better way to spend the rest of the day than retracing your steps by foot alongside the great continent-splitting waterway that divides Istanbul in two.
The morning commuter ferry takes an hour from Beşiktaş, in the centre of town, to Sarıyer, just 12km south of the Black Sea.
The return trip by foot takes at least five hours — and with stops for breakfast, coffee, lunch and a drink or two you can easily consume a day. The 20km or so walk reveals a city many visitors merely glimpse when emerging from conference rooms or world-famous sites teeming with tourists.
Don’t take my word for it. After marvelling at “The European with the Asian shore / Sprinkled with palaces”, Byron wrote in his Don Juan over two centuries ago that the Bosphorus offered “more than I could dream/ Far less describe”.
I have got to know the walk along the European side, which is largely unbroken by roads, apart from two or three times when you have to loop away from the shore.
Sometimes the boat goes all the way to the neighbourhood of Rumeli Kavağı, before the city begins. From there you walk back on an empty road punctuated by out-of-the-way cafés and restaurants with spectacular views of the strait and the third bridge across the Bosphorus, one of the controversial urban development projects beloved of the ever more powerful President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
But no matter how much building goes on in Istanbul and how much concrete goes up, the city always seems, if not indestructible, then inexhaustible.
Here are some highlights from the walk.
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Sarıyer
One big question — a dilemma humankind has wrestled with for centuries — is where to have breakfast. When walking the Bosphorus, this faded, one-time fishing village (now swallowed up by Istanbul) is a perfectly palatable answer.
For a bite to eat — such as a traditional menemen with eggs, pepper and tomatoes — there are few places better at this hour than the no-frills Sarıyer Sports Club Cafeteria, which looks out across the Bosphorus below faded photos of former footballers. Ask for an accompanying cup of Turkish coffee and the bill should come to no more than £5. It is just a few minutes’ stroll from the jetty where the ferry stops.
Boats bob up and down nearby: workaday vessels — patrol boats, tugboats and fishing boats, not the yachts you will see lower down the Bosphorus. I love the sound of the water slapping against them.
The Grand Tarabya hotel
From Sarıyer the walk proper starts, following the crazy logic of the curves of the Bosphorus, so that sometimes you feel you are walking away from the city ahead, and sometimes the sea seems both beside and in front of you. (Do not in any circumstances refer to the Bosphorus as a river; it’s a strait.)
At this time and this far up the coast, the traffic is not intrusive. Fishermen stand some 10 metres apart as they try their luck, not jammed together as in the centre of town.
The road is to your right, as are sometimes rotting but often immaculately preserved wooden Ottoman houses — striking in their delicate elegance. One magnificent neo-classical pile is the Russian consul’s summer residence — later on in the walk are the German and Austrian equivalents.
After about an hour you reach the Grand Tarabya hotel, a 12-storey slice of 1960s style that served as a backdrop for Turkish movies of the era. If Elizabeth Taylor didn’t stay here, she should have.
The restaurant, with its view of the adjoining harbour, is chic if not cheap — a bottle of Turkish white could put you back £100. But its marbled and air-conditioned splendour is a more than welcome place to break the journey for 20 or so relatively expensive minutes.
Yeniköy
A word of warning. The walking times in this article presuppose dawdling. If you want to barrel forward, this route is not for you: there is too much to see to rush past.
That said, Yeniköy, one of the most delightful stops, with its canopied trees, birdsong and Ottoman-era mansions (together with a mosque, church and synagogue), is about 45 minutes from The Grand Tarabya.
The Greek-Egyptian poet CP Cavafy, the author of Waiting for the Barbarians, once lived here. In his 1885 poem “Nichori”, which refers to Yeniköy by its Greek name, he wrote:
“If, stranger, you should find a spot where nature smiles / and where behind every plane tree there hides / A girl as lovely as a rose — stop there and do not worry / You have come, stranger to Nichori.”
It is hard not to follow his advice and halt here. Yeniköy has old Greek-built stone mansions next to their wooden Ottoman counterparts, stairs that wind up from the road beside a tangle of vegetation — all part of this place’s remaining charms, if charm is not too weak a word.
Michelin and Gault Millau restaurants cluster by the shore. But for a simpler meal walk past the main drag, to the Takinik fish restaurant.
It lacks the sea view of the area’s more exclusive establishments and does not serve alcohol. But the grilled sardines, best savoured in the garden, along with marinated sea bass and other light dishes, are a joy at not much more than £10.
Sakıp Sabancı Museum
After Yeniköy, a good half an hour’s walk takes you past Emirgan Park to the photogenic Sakıp Sabancı Museum. This near-century old mansion gives an idea of the life of a Turkish billionaire. Two horse statues stand guard in the garden, one of them a cast of an ancient Greek masterpiece Venice robbed from Constantinople over 800 years ago.
Inside you can find more classical statuary, the works of the Orientalist painter Fausto Zonaro and an extensive collection of Korans and holy texts. The mansion’s front rooms give the visitor an almost private view of the Bosphorus. The wine list of the adjoining restaurant — which is affiliated with a leading culinary institute — runs to some 14 pages.
Rumeli Hisarı
Half an hour on, when you return to the waterfront after a brief diversion under the second Bosphorus bridge, you come to the 15th-century Rumeli Hisarı. This magnificent fortress was built by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II as a statement of intent in 1452, the year before he captured Constantinople.
It sits on the European side of the Bosphorus, opposite an earlier fortress on the Anatolian bank, and helped provide control of the waterway as well as serving warning to the soon-to-be-conquered Byzantines.
The building is still an imposing hulk — but is under restoration, a fact announced by cardboard placards where the entrance should be. On a recent afternoon, the only souls in attendance were two plaster janissaries and a sleeping dog. But there are plenty of cafés nearby and at least one superior fish restaurant.
Bebek
From this point on, the remaining hour of the main walk from Sarıyer to Arnavutköy (see below) is more of an Italian-style passeggiata, an exercise in seeing and being seen. Passers-by wear far more fashionable boots than can be spotted a few kilometres further north. The boats are also visibly more expensive.
As you approach Bebek, a slightly time-warped but stylish suburb, it feels like mixing with the jet set, even if you’re not quite sure which decade you’re in. At times, your view of the sea is only glimpsed through elegant restaurants, whether Italian or Japanese or even Turkish. Perhaps the best known is the 70-year old Bebek Balıkçı. A meal here will feature expertly prepared meze and very fresh fish. It can also easily cost £100 for two, not including alcohol.
Arnavutköy, or “Village of the Albanians”, is a desperately pretty stretch of land. The grand old white wooden Ottoman houses that once gave directly on to the sea have been pushed back by the embankment, but still delight the eye.
In a Greek-built building beside them is Arnavutköy Balıkçısı, another legendarily luxurious fish restaurant, which, if you want to treat yourself, offers a perfectly reasonable way to blow a lot of money.
Finally, you come to the Kuruçeşme complex of restaurants and clubs that, for a while at least, represents the end of the public walkway just beside the Bosphorus.
The subsequent walk is not so pleasant; you can feel hemmed in by the Istanbul traffic — by late afternoon in its Platonic state of near immobility — and a barbed wire fence. This might be the moment to call it quits and head back to your hotel via bus, taxi or indeed boat.
But for the completists there are some real high points on the remaining road.
The district of Ortaköy, or “Middle Village”, provides one of the best-known views of Istanbul: a mosque that boasts the first Bosphorus bridge as a backdrop.
The Çırağan Palace Kempinski hotel is spectacular, an Ottoman palace converted into a five-star hotel with an infinity pool beside the Bosphorus. Its Sultan suite (as used by Madonna and Oprah) costs some €56,000 a night. But if you just order a tea or a beer on the seaside terrace, you might feel like a movie star all the same.
And at the very end of the walk is Beşiktaş, with its coffee bars, fish restaurants and sometimes philosophical football fans (many are nihilists). There is nowhere better in Istanbul than its harbour to watch the boats leaving and arriving to and from all points on the Bosphorus. Here you can rest your feet, sink a beer and then travel across the waves, deeper into a city that has been magnificent for millennia and is a privilege to spend time in.
Seen from this vantage point, the silhouette of the old city is little changed from the Constantinople of 400 years ago and not wholly different from the Byzantine city of 1,400 years ago. It is one of the most beautiful sights in the world, especially when you are borne over water towards it.
WB Yeats never got any closer to Istanbul than Sicily, but sometimes, as I make one last boat trip at the end of a day on the Bosphorus, his words return to my mind: “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.”
Where do you like to go walking in Istanbul? Tell us in the comments below. And follow us on Instagram at @ftglobetrotter
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